By the late 1950s, the author felt keenly that America had gone morally flabby, a position sketched in an often reprinted piece first published in Newsday, “Adlai Stevenson and John Steinbeck Discuss the Past and the Present.” (Steinbeck’s part of this piece is reprinted here as “Dear Adlai.”) Much of his work of the late 1950s and 1960s, both in fiction and nonfiction, is a jeremiad, exhorting Americans to consider their excesses and mend their collective ways. He objected to racism, certainly, to the disappearing sense of community and the destruction of the environment, certainly, but particularly to our growing materialism and loss of bedrock values: honor, courage, duty, love of country, and compassion for one’s fellow man. Steinbeck’s love of the Arthurian legends and what he thought were the enduring values of that time colored his response to America, and later to the Vietnam War. In America, as he wrote Stevenson, he recognized the “creeping, all pervading, nerve-gas of immorality which starts in the nursery and does not stop before it reaches the highest offices both corporate and governmental.” Such comments sparked a “national controversy” and generated a symposium published in The New Republic titled “Have We Gone Soft?” (15 Feb. 1960), with comments by Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.; theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; Harry Golden, author of Only in America; and the Rev. Thurston N. Davis, editor of America magazine. “Mr. Steinbeck’s fears are valid,” writes Golden, “because his whole concern as an original thinker has been with the tomorrow. At this point in our history we have stopped living for the tomorrow” (15). Niebuhr concurred: “[O]ur moral and political complacency exposes us to the dangers which all soft nations of history have encountered” (15). Steinbeck had given voice to the anxiety that percolated beneath the bland surface of the 1950s.
This section includes one example of Steinbeck’s political coverage. Whether he is writing for an English or an American audience, his tone changes from reflective to gently ironic. Most articles were written for the Courier-Journal in 1956, when, Steinbeck reports, “It occurred to me that a politically untrained reporter might be healthy” (12 Aug. 1956) and he offered to cover the national political conventions for the paper. His offer was accepted immediately by publisher Mark Ethridge, a friend of the Steinbecks since the couples had met a couple of years earlier on a return trip from Europe. “I can promise your readers,” Steinbeck announced at the beginning of his series, “that I will be just as wrong as any of my competitors, only I hope to be more interesting than some” (12 Aug. 1956). He was. His twelve front-page columns, also syndicated in forty papers around the country, are filled with vintage Steinbeck, “a Peeping Tom and an eavesdropper at heart” (18 Aug. 1956). He delights in worm’s-eye views, grubbing for the political insights of his cab driver, “the man at Gate 2-A” (14 Aug. 1956), and “the nice woman who has been serving me hot dogs and Cokes all week” whose arms have been burned repeatedly by lifting the hot dog steamer (19 Aug. 1956). By the end of the Democratic convention, exhausted by speechifying and “standing behind the mighty,” Steinbeck writes, “Maybe it’s perverse in me, but I find in myself a kind of hunger for a dishonest, cowardly, inhumane, and nongreat American” (18 Aug. 1956). It is this vein in Steinbeck that long endeared him to readers: the dry humor, the affinity for the “nongreat,” and the ability to fix attention on what would seem, to a less practiced eye, a perfectly ordinary detail—and make that detail tell a whole story: “The Republicans have much better and bigger badges than the Democrats: In Chicago, I had a little old plastic card to pin to my lapel. Here in San Francisco they have given me a glorious bronze medal on a white ribbon, a combination of sharpshooter’s medal and the Order of the Golden Fleece. I may wear this permanently and pass it on to my children.”
After watching the “gutterfighting of the Democrats” and the “calm, the smooth and ordered mediocrity” of the Republicans, Steinbeck concludes his election coverage with his own political stance: “I find to my consternation that I am basically, intrinsically and irresistibly a Democrat” (25 Aug. 1956).
Dubious Battle in California
IN SIXTY YEARS a complete revolution has taken place in California agriculture. Once its principal products were hay and cattle. Today fruits and vegetables are its most profitable crops. With the change in the nature of farming there has come a parallel change in the nature and amount of the labor necessary to carry it on. Truck gardens, while they give a heavy yield per acre, require much more labor and equipment than the raising of hay and livestock. At the same time these crops are seasonal, which means that they are largely handled by migratory workers. Along with the intensification of farming made necessary by truck gardening has come another important development. The number of large-scale farms, involving the investment of thousands of dollars, has increased; so has the number of very small farms of from five to ten acres. But the middle farm, of from 100 to 300 acres is in process of elimination.
There are in California, therefore, two distinct classes of farmers widely separated in standard of living, desires, needs, and sympathies: the very small farmer who more often than not takes the side of the workers in disputes and the speculative farmer, like A. J. Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, or like Herbert Hoover and William Randolph Hearst, absentee owners who possess huge sections of land. Allied with these large individual growers have been the big incorporated farms, owned by their stockholders and farmed by instructed managers, and a large number of bank farms, acquired by foreclosure and operated by superintendents whose labor policy is dictated by the bank. For example, the Bank of America is very nearly the largest farm owner and operator in the state of California.
These two classes have little or no common ground; while the small farmer is likely to belong to the Grange, the speculative farmer belongs to some such organization as the Associated Farmers of California, which is closely tied to the state Chamber of Commerce. This group has as its major activity resistance to any attempt of farm labor to organize. Its avowed purpose has been the distribution of news reports and leaflets tending to show that every attempt to organize agricultural workers was the work of red agitators and that every organization was Communist-inspired.
The completion of the transcontinental railroads left in the country many thousands of Chinese and some Hindus who had been imported for the work. At about the same time the increase of fruit crops, with their heavy seasonal need for pickers, created a demand for this mass of cheap labor. These people, however, did not long remain on the land. They migrated to the cities, rented small plots of land there, and, worst of all, organized in the so-called “tongs,” which were able to direct their efforts as a group. Soon the whites were inflamed to race hatred, riots broke out against the Chinese, and repressive activities were undertaken all over the state, until these people, who had been a tractable and cheap source of labor, were driven from the fields.
To take the place of the Chinese, the Japanese were encouraged to come into California; and they, even more than the Chinese, showed an ability not only to obtain land for their subsistence but to organize. The “Yellow Peril” agitation was the result. Then, soon after the turn of the century Mexicans were imported in great numbers. For a while they were industrious workers, until the process of importing twice as many as were needed in order to depress wages made their earnings drop below any conceivable living standard. In such conditions they did what the others had done; they began to organize. The large growers immediately opened fire on them. The newspapers were full of the radicalism of the Mexican unions. Riots became common in the Imperial Valley and in the grape country in and adjacent to Kern County. Another wave of importations was arranged, from the Philippine Islands, and the cycle was repeated—wage depression due to abundant labor, organization, and the inevitable race hatred and riots.
This brings us almost to the present. The drought in the Middle West has very recently made available an enormous amount of cheap labor. Workers have been coming to California in nondescript cars from Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas,
and other states, parts of which have been rendered uninhabitable by drought. Poverty-stricken after the destruction of their farms, their last reserves used up in making the trip, they have arrived so beaten and destitute that they have been willing at first to work under any conditions and for any wages offered. This migration started on a considerable scale about two years ago and is increasing all the time.
For a time it looked as though the present cycle would be identical with the earlier ones, but there are several factors in this influx which differentiate it from the others. In the first place, the migrants are undeniably American and not deportable. In the second place, they were not lured to California by a promise of good wages, but are refugees as surely as though they had fled from destruction by an invader. In the third place, they are not drawn from a peon class, but have either owned small farms or been farm hands in the early American sense, in which the “hand” is a member of the employing family. They have one fixed idea, and that is to acquire land and settle on it. Probably the most important difference is that they are not easily intimidated. They are courageous, intelligent, and resourceful. Having gone through the horrors of the drought and with immense effort having escaped from it, they cannot be herded, attacked, starved, or frightened as all the others were.
Let us see what the emigrants from the Dust Bowl find when they arrive in California. The ranks of permanent and settled labor are filled. In most cases all resources have been spent in making the trip from the Dust Bowl. Unlike the Chinese and the Filipinos, the men rarely come alone. They bring wives and children, now and then a few chickens and their pitiful household goods, though in most cases these have been sold to buy gasoline for the trip. It is quite usual for a man, his wife, and from three to eight children to arrive in California with no possessions but the rattletrap car they travel in and the ragged clothes on their bodies. They often lack bedding and cooking utensils.
During the spring, summer, and part of the fall the man may find some kind of agricultural work. The top pay for a successful year will not be over $400, and if he has any trouble or is not agile, strong, and quick it may well be only $150. It will be seen that rent is out of the question. Clothes cannot be bought. Every available cent must go for food and a reserve to move the car from harvest to harvest. The migrant will stop in one of two federal camps, in a state camp, in houses put up by the large or small farmers, or in the notorious squatters’ camps. In the state and federal camps he will find sanitary arrangements and a place to pitch his tent. The camps maintained by the large farmers are of two classes—houses which are rented to the workers at what are called nominal prices, $4 to $8 a month, and camp grounds which are little if any better than the squatters’ camps. Since rent is such a problem, let us see how the houses are fitted. Ordinarily there is one room, no running water; one toilet and one bathroom are provided for two or three hundred persons. Indeed, one large farmer was accused in a Growers’ Association meeting of being “kind of communistic” because he advocated separate toilets for men and women. Some of the large ranches maintain what are called model workers’ houses. One such ranch, run by a very prominent man, has neat single-room houses built of whitewashed adobe. They are said to have cost $500 apiece. They are rented for $5 a month. This ranch pays twenty cents an hour as opposed to the thirty cents paid at other ranches and endorsed by the Grange in the community. Since this rugged individual is saving 331/3 percent of his labor cost and still charging $5 a month rent for his houses, it will be readily seen that he is getting a very fair return on his money besides being generally praised as a philanthropist. The reputation of this ranch, however, is that the migrants stay only long enough to get money to buy gasoline with, and then move on.
The small farmers are not able to maintain camps of any comfort or with any sanitary facilities except one or two holes dug for toilets. The final resource is the squatters’ camp, usually located on the bank of some watercourse. The people pack into them. They use the watercourse for drinking, bathing, washing their clothes, and to receive their refuse, with the result that epidemics start easily and are difficult to check. Stanislaus County, for example, has a nice culture of hookworm in the mud by its squatters’ camp. The people in these camps, because of long-continued privation, are in no shape to fight illness. It is often said that no one starves in the United States, yet in Santa Clara County last year five babies were certified by the local coroner to have died of “malnutrition,” the modern word for starvation, and the less shocking word, although in its connotation it is perhaps more horrible, since it indicates that the suffering has been long drawn out.
In these squatters’ camps the migrant will find squalor beyond anything he has yet had to experience and intimidation almost unchecked. At one camp it is the custom of deputy sheriffs, who are also employees of a great ranch nearby, to drive by the camp for hours at a time, staring into the tents as though trying to memorize faces. The communities in which these camps exist want migratory workers to come for the month required to pick the harvest, and to move on when it is over. If they do not move on, they are urged to with guns.
These are some of the conditions California offers the refugees from the Dust Bowl. But the refugees are even less content with the starvation wages and the rural slums than were the Chinese, the Filipinos, and the Mexicans. Having their families with them, they are not so mobile as the earlier immigrants were. If starvation sets in, the whole family starves, instead of just one man. Therefore they have been quick to see that they must organize for their own safety.
Attempts to organize have been met with a savagery from the large growers beyond anything yet attempted. In Kern County a short time ago a group met to organize under the AF of L. They made out their form and petition for a charter and put it in the mail for Washington. That night a representative of Associated Farmers wired Washington for information concerning a charter granted to these workers. The Washington office naturally replied that it had no knowledge of such a charter. In the Bakersfield papers the next day appeared a story that the AF of L denied the affiliation; consequently the proposed union must be of Communist origin.
But the use of the term “communism” as a bugbear has nearly lost its sting. An official of a speculative-farmer group, when asked what he meant by a Communist, replied: “Why, he’s the guy that wants twenty-five cents an hour when we’re paying twenty.” This realistic and cynical definition has finally been understood by the workers, so that the term is no longer the frightening thing it was. And when a county judge said, “California agriculture demands that we create and maintain a peon-age,” the future of unorganized agricultural labor was made clear to every man in the field.
The usual repressive measures have been used against these migrants: shooting by deputy sheriffs in “self-defense,” jailing without charge, refusal of trial by jury, torture and beating by night riders. But even in the short time that these American migrants have been out here there has been a change. It is understood that they are being attacked not because they want higher wages, not because they are Communists, but simply because they want to organize. And to the men, since this defines the thing not to be allowed, it also defines the thing that is completely necessary to the safety of the workers.
This season has seen the beginning of a new form of intimidation not used before. It is the whispering campaign which proved so successful among business rivals. As in business, it is particularly deadly here because its source cannot be traced and because it is easily spread. One of the items of this campaign is the rumor that in the event of labor troubles the deputy sheriffs inducted to break up picket lines will be armed not with tear gas but with poison gas. The second is aimed at the women and marks a new low in tactics. It is to the effect that in the event of labor troubles the water supply used by strikers will be infected with typhoid germs. The fact that these bits of information are current over a good part of the state indicates that they have been widely planted.
The effect has been far
from that desired. There is now in California anger instead of fear. The stupidity of the large grower has changed terror into defensive fury. The Granges, working close to the soil and to the men, and knowing the temper of the men of this new race, have tried to put through wages that will allow a living, however small. But the large growers, who have been shown to be the only group making a considerable profit from agriculture, are devoting their money to tear gas and rifle ammunition. The men will organize and the large growers will meet organization with force. It is easy to prophesy this. In Kern County the Grange has voted $1 a hundred pounds for cotton pickers for the first picking. The Associated Farmers have not yielded from seventy-five cents. There is tension in the valley, and fear for the future.
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Page 10